1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to recommender systems that provide users with recommendations for products, services, or location, which meet their stated or inferred preferences. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus that facilitates making recommendations for leisure activities based on both locality and utility to the user using a spatial database.
2. Related Art
Recommender systems are often used in conjunction with online retail sales to make recommendation based on user preferences. For example, if a user has a preference for science fiction books, such a system might recommend all new books associated with the term “science fiction.” With the recent advent of location-aware and mobile computing systems it is desirable to incorporate spatial data as part of the recommendation. As there might be millions of potentially recommendable items and a large number of concurrent users, it is desirable that such a system is scalable and sufficiently fast for real-time use.